Tom Stiglich.
Open Thread – Weekend 17 Feb 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 16 Sept 2024
- No, Your Holiness, killing babies and border control are not the same
- Open Thread – Weekend 14 Sept 2024
- Open Thread – Thurs 12 Sept 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 9 Sept 2024
Matt Margolis.
Brett Lethbridge.
Peter Broelman.
Mark Knight.
The scene where the Rick Moranis character goes stark staring bonkers is absolutely hilarious.
Are you saying nobody in the West should criticise Putin?
Not in these parts or QLD generally.
That’s because dotty, you refuse to admit to yourself that Islam isn’t really a religion, but actually a violent death cult energized by 1500 years of in-breeding. That “crisis” was actually the open borders which you supported at the time. Which has in turn, turned Europe into a violent Islamic hell hole in many parts. That “crisis” now manifests in support across Europe for the Hamas barbarians after their orgy of slaughter and unspeakable killing in southern Israel. That’s what open borders inevitably gets you. A minority inside your own country.
And…
Hear, hear! dot.
Post WWII the west seemed very strong and healthy but that was illusory.
I think the west was strong and healthy up to about 1963. Then it all went wrong.
JFK assassination, Vietnam, Immigration act letting the third world flood into the US. Final act was USSR collapse. Imminent threat of thermonuclear destruction tends to minds focused, after that the west wandered off into la-la land. George Orwell had something to say about that.
Yeah. The communists were active even before the Axis were defeated. The Gramsci march through the institutions was already underway, and now has reached complete victory.
Hole Celebrity Skin.
Courtney Love and the bass player are super sexy but kind of evil.
Fighting for England in WWI and WWII as an Australian was a natural extension of Australian nationalism.
yes that’s true but there doesn’t seem to have been much appreciation for the sacrifice for many decades.
Why is this pettifogging hostility even necessary?
You must have missed this part:
Kane Pixels.
He scared the sh*t of me with the backrooms.
I spent a day with BACKROOMS CREATOR KANE PIXELS
Yep. The result of the inexorable long march of collectivism through our easily infiltrated institutions – all of which I now want utterly obliterated.
Fighting for England in WWI and WWII as an Australian was a natural extension of Australian nationalism. There never any doubt it was the right thing to do.
Jingoistic nationalism. We should have told the Brits to call us when it was all over. Not our circus, not our monkeys.
The 1990s were a great time. We didn’t think we were going to get nuked.
Imagine the 1980s in America without the threat of nuclear war.
I refuse to believe we can’t have anything good or live with a purpose without an existential threat.
It’s like the myth that military spending spurs technology. It doesn’t. There are civilian applications for virtually all military technologies.
Don’t start me on the black death being given the status of a blessing in disguise:
https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html
Zafiro – this is a much better song – and yes, the bass player is gorgeous.
When I think of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, I think of Jamie Shea BA(Hons) DPhil (Oxon).
He described the children and adult civilians killed by the NATO bombing of Serbia in the effort to prevent the Serbs from retaining Kosovo as the “cost to defeat an evil”.
In Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1996) Robert Bork* makes that observation in regard to the US in the 1960s. The counter-culture and the subsequent transformation of American values only succeeded, he argues, because post-war American society was already hollowed out in terms of its values and virtues.
* The Reagan SCOTUS nominee rejected by the Senate in 1987. The chair of the Senate Judiciary C’tee at the time was Joe Biden.
So he’s presumably right on board with Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Although I doubt it.
Yeah cheers Rabz. Malibu is their best song. I like Celebrity Skin for some reason.
Tom, re Nat pisspots, I always liked “full as the family commode”
Dunno who to h/t.
Jimmy Maher described his condition after celebrating Qld’s first shield win:
“Full as a purple Valiant”.
Not our circus, not our monkeys.
My view about the Middle East and the Ukraine.
I refuse to believe we can’t have anything good or live with a purpose without an existential threat.
As an individual you might but societies run off the rails and you live in a society. Eventually the shit societies do catches up with you.
For a good example, look around you. Happy with the state of affairs of the world?
Interesting reading the histories. There was a very strong allegiance to the British Empire, and a lot of pride in it from ordinary Aussies. By the time I was at school in the sixties that had mostly evaporated, and was definitely gone completely by the early seventies, but it was quite strong in the time from Federation up to about 1960.
with any reasonable sort of media coverage any reasonably brained person would see the transparent, obvious shit being perpetrated against Trump and the rest of society.
The US media are in large part the problem.
Shea is just another example of the effete trash that is ruining the west. Has this creep ever actually had to fight a war?
Interesting question Rabz.
That doesn’t preclude people from being critical of Putin.
Interesting reading the histories. There was a very strong allegiance to the British Empire, and a lot of pride in it from ordinary Aussies.
The Brits used this to screw us over big time.
Not our circus, not our monkeys.
You live in a society.
I know these were posted by different people but someone please reconcile these.
Weren’t people arguing against Pigouvian subsidies the other day?
True.
I remember talking to a “smartest guy in the room banker” banker type in the very early days who thought the strategy was just bwilliant.
Mind you, I thought Wussia would roll straight over the Ukes, so we were both wrong.
PS … a shot of a couple of well stocked supermarket shelves in central Moscow and a vagrant-free railway station is not much proof of anything.
Indeed and F yeah. Melissa Auf der Maur Sexy as.
UK Labour’s anti-semitism problem has been solved.
Or maybe trolled.
Judge Orders Trump To Pay Whatever Amount It Takes To Bankrupt Campaign
NEW YORK — Former President Trump’s civil trial in New York has concluded with Judge Arthur Engoron ordering that Trump pay whatever dollar amount is necessary to bankrupt his Presidential campaign.
“I, Judge Engoron, hereby rule that President Trump must pay — hang on, let me google what his campaign raised last quarter,” said Judge Ergoron. “Oh forget it, whatever it takes to crush Trump’s re-election, that’s how much Trump owes. Case closed!”
The civil trial was initiated by New York Attorney General Letitia James who argued that Trump received good terms on bank loans, thus endangering democracy. “Trump receiving a slightly better interest rate on a loan fifteen years ago was the death rattle of America,” said James.
“At last, with using Trump’s conviction on a victimless crime to bankrupt one of the two major Presidential candidates, democracy has been saved.”
According to legal scholars, the case hinged on whether Trump had inflated the worth of his real estate holdings in order to secure more favorable loan rates.
After careful review, Judge Ergoron ruled that Trump’s 63,000 square-foot mansion at Mar-A-Lago, including multiple beaches, was worth approximately eight dollars.
As such, Judge Ergoron declared that banks had been nice to Trump, which clearly caused people living in New York terrible distress, and that could only be assuaged by Trump being forced to pay enough money to destroy his campaign.
At publishing time, Judge Ergoron had also ruled that Trump had to also pay off the national debt and go pick up his dry cleaning.
Interesting reading the histories. There was a very strong allegiance to the British Empire, and a lot of pride in it from ordinary Aussies.
We were a British satrapy and they repaid us by being willing to throw us under the bus in WW2 which was a result of the goddamned Americans getting into WW1 after Wilson got elected by saying they would not. Otherwise the Brits, French, Germans would have given up from exhaustion without any winners, not that there were really any anyway.
The counter-culture and the subsequent transformation of American values only succeeded, he argues, because post-war American society was already hollowed out in terms of its values and virtues.
yes that’s interesting- up until the mid 60s the US to me was Mom and apple pie.
True, but events of February 1942 put a serious dint in that.
A bit hard to avoid the war after the Zimmerman Telegram was made public.
Milosevic was in the process of herding the 2 million Kosovar muzzos over the border into Albania. That was ‘way too much for the political class to accept at the time.
The irony is that the muzzo Azeris have just done exactly the same thing to the Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and no one said a thing.
The sensibilities are fraying, and mass deportations may become more common in the current era. But Milosevic overstepped the politically possible at the time. Bosnia has been getting a bit feral again lately, but so far not too excitably.
Gaza will be interesting. The Egyptians are quietly building a detention camp on their side of the border with a capacity for 300,000.
No, not that, as you’re no doubt aware. Come on Bruce, stop playing dumb as I know that is one thing you aren’t. You know what I’m talking about. You claimed Putin had said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire or something along those lines. I asked you for a link to the speech in which he said that. You said there was a link in the comment in which you claimed this, but it seems you forgot to include it because there was no link. So I asked you to provide it. And I ask again.
Milosevic was in the process of herding the 2 million Kosovar muzzos over the border into Albania.
As Lt. Col. Ralph Peters US Army (retd) said, “the dirty little secret of ethnic cleansing is that it works”.
Is that all that they figure will be left? The IDF need to get on with the job then. Time’s a wasting.
As far as WW I is concerned, it would have been our circus and our monkeys had a German victory leaving the UK among the defeated nations.
In that era, the victor took over the colonies of the losers, and Imperial Germany wanted a real empire, not a few scraps of Africa. The German colony in New Guinea/New Britain/Bougainville would have been the stepping stone to demanding, at the absolute least, Papua, the Solomons, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia as spoils for Germany.
It is also at the least possible that much of northern Australia, then with few non-Aboriginal inhabitants, might have been demanded as part of the peace negotiations. Australia would have had no capability to resist such demands, with the RN and French Navy in German hands.
A circus indeed, with Australia among the monkeys being traded.
Not at all. Although, speaking for myself, I’d rather give the media the kicking it richly deserves. What Putin does in Russia doesn’t greatly impact my life, whereas the media’s complicity in pushing the Covid propaganda narrative very much does and is unforgivable.
Bruce> That may be true in practice – presumption of innocence is the declared standard.
J’accuse Bruce!
Roger – we still had great big maps of the British Empire in our classroom in 1970. But a few years later all had gone. I suspect Whitlam purged it, that would’ve been in character.
Dot> Well written comment.
Binary choices for leaders is just a case of false dilemma e.g. “Choose Biden or Trump !… ‘none of the above, thanks!’
Wise words.
Certainly worked a treat in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
… after a German victory …
Australia’s ruling classes have never had the imagination to envisage an independent Australia that isn’t the satrapy of a great power. If it ever becomes clear that the US can’t defend us against the Chinese, they’ll hitch our wagon to Beijing quick smart.
The German colony in New Guinea/New Britain/Bougainville would have been the stepping stone to demanding, at the absolute least, Papua, the Solomons, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia as spoils for Germany.
So what? Last I heard we don’t own any of those.
As I said, absent the Americans the war in Europe would have ground to halt. The Germans were willing to talk and all go home from 1916. I doubt anything would have changed here.
Going out to fish the evening rise on the Clutha river tonight. Been here for a week and a half, my mate is almost ready to come back home to Aus. Don’t get sick in NZ, the health system back home may be bad but here it’s diabolical. Completely stuffed. I’ve heard first hand tails of woe. I notice not that many fatties around, must be all the outdoor activities. Price of fuel is 50% dearer. I was doing 120kph in a 100 zone, the cop coming the other way did a patting motion to slow me down. Can’t have had the lazer going. Only saw one person getting a ticket just going into a town. The little Toyota Aqua (prius) is getting 24 km/l. on the open road. Mate alerted me to little known bit about electric vehicles, they are designed for very good roads. Limited suspension movement and smaller tyres. The roads here will all have to be improved and they are a lot better condition than Aus. Only seen a few cars older than 20 years. Lots of jap imports. The Toyota I’ve got has just over 100k on the clock and is only worth $15k. Report on the fishing later.
lively stuff here today.
On Pigovian taxes, I’d say Labor love their petty bourgeous liberalism almost as much as they love the nice pensions paid out for years of ‘work’ fighting so-called ‘tories’.
The AI for Wix is in the glass basement. Slow, literally not fast and the conclusions are indicative of technological fetal alcohol syndrome.
If it ever becomes clear that the US can’t defend us against the Chinese, they’ll hitch our wagon to Beijing quick smart.
I think the Chinese have already bought all the political influence they want in Australia as well as making substantial inroads into colonizing the place.
I don’t blame Australia’s WWI leadership (or population) for joining the British war effort. Setting to one side the constitutional restrictions upon charting an independent foreign policy at that time, we were also a very young nation that fundamentally regarded itself as British.
With that said, a victorious Germany (or Japan) would have had great difficulties overrunning Australia in either war, really – if the population decided to resist. We are blessed by our geography.
OCO – Yes I did. And I told you to search for his Peter The Great speech. Which you obviously didn’t, or you wouldn’t be asking me.
Putin compares himself to Peter the Great in quest to take back Russian lands (10 Jul 2022)
That’s the Grauniad, which is the first link that comes up. I can’t be bothered to find a better source. Easy to find plenty others if you exert yourself. Others like Medvedev and Lavrov have been saying the same stuff, like about Moldova and Kazakhstan.
Putin’s ‘next target is Moldova’ using ‘very similar’ rhetoric to Ukraine invasion, expert warns (15 Feb)
Russian Rhetoric Toward Central Asia Grows Increasingly Hostile (14 Feb)
The Russians haven’t been hiding their ambitions. That’s why nations are falling over themselves to sign up for NATO and the EU. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I don’t know why Putin and his guys have been so loud about this.
Ironically the Russians claim to everyone and everything has stimulated some fun counterclaims from Chinese nationalists lately, who want Vladivostok and Eastern Siberia back. They were ceded to Russia in a treaty in 1860, which is rather resented by the them.
Anybody see Malcolm Roberts quizzing our pubic serpents about Australian fuel supplies?
FMD, what a bunch of stupid, obfuscating parasites. If you shot the lot we’d be better off.
Here again in Fiji. Third visit in 30 years. Not much has changed. Still fairly shambolic – roads are not good either. And of course raining – they get between two and three metres a year.
Apparently population now nearly up to a million people. Most of them seem to want to emigrate to Australia.
Okay, so you don’t actually have a speech where Putin said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire, just a bunch of media reports pushing the same old ‘Putin is going to gobble up his neighbours and recreate the Russian empire/ USSR’ line.
Once he’s done with Ukraine, Europe is next! Right?
The funny thing is that Biden’s handlers think that nobody can see it.
It matters none that people can see it. Absolutely no-one does anything about it and the Dems would already have enough postal votes signed, sealed and waiting to deliver, even if Trump gets 95 million votes…
The whole of the US can be summed up in one small sentence.
“The Senate Republicans continuously re-elect McConnell as their leader”
That says absolutely everything anyone needs to know about the US…
If they were genuinely scared of Russia, they’d actually, y’know, start to develop functioning defence forces.
“The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was justified. The ensuing nation-building failed. Just like Iraq in 2003.”
You must be into the gin early today Dot.
Any danger of you expanding on that statement to justify it?
I make the assumption, that you are aware of the meaning of “justified”.
Did Serbia ask for intervention, or, did the UN pass a resolution for it?
Oh, I see, …….., it was just like Libya, Syria and Afghanistan then.
U.S. – “We can bomb you pricks and not be hurt in return”.
Rest of World – “Fair cop.”
From the OOT:
Yes, and yes.
The Chinese aren’t going to interrupt trade between Australia and Chinese ports. And they are very unlikely to interrupt trade between Australia and Vietnam or Phillipines travelling through SC sea.
None of this has to do with the principle of innocent passage. The various countries that surround it and have varying claims over the SC sea are motivated largely by its potential or actual resources. Further, China depends on trade so it isn’t going to block the sea lanes vital to it.
The memorials in small country towns I find the most poignant. I dare say in most districts there wouldn’t have been a family untouched by the Great War – as my grandmother and her generation called it – in some way.
Same goes for the UK.
Oh come on
Feb 17, 2024 1:38 PM
Yes, and even the linked leftarded Guardian’s interpretation is that Putin “APPEARS” to be taking over all of Europe because (blah blah woke leftist trash talk.handed out by Brit MoD).
Why TF would anyone want to take over these woke green leftist moslem infested EU states anyway? Could it be a woke Marxist media campaign to discredit nationalist values?
Neither did North Korea.
Next.
lotocoti
If people refuse to fight the invaders they will be invaded.
It’s quite simple, folks.
The time for protesting has come and gone.
FMD, what a bunch of stupid, obfuscating parasites. If you shot the lot we’d be better off.
The whole federal (really feral) apparatus has degenerated into a complete abomination. We’d be better off without it. Remember ‘Dr’ Parkinson accusing Tony Abbot of damaging the pubic service. That’s how they think in canbra. I really loath Parkinson.
Eyrie
Feb 17, 2024 1:37 PM
Anybody see Malcolm Roberts quizzing our pubic serpents about Australian fuel supplies?
FMD, what a bunch of stupid, obfuscating parasites. If you shot the lot we’d be better off.
And what did Abbott, Turn Bull Shite and ScoMo do about fixing it when they were in Feral Guv’ment? SFA, that’s what. The buck stops with the ‘Pollies’ every time. This latest shower are of course the worst though. Everything will be run on batteries. LOL.
Steve trickler
Feb 17, 2024 10:23 AM
Another bloody import who fails to take the basic precautions. Load not secured. Truck left running, in gear, no parking brake.
They’re not sending their best.
Amazing what you find wandering through an old Hard Drive
Under Books saved from a 16GB USB
The Following Authors with complete set of Books for all – For Sherlock Holmes .lit had to download Calibre App to read – Now all copied onto iMac Hard Drive
A Christie
Brown
C McCullough
Clancy
Cussler
Dick Francis
E Peters
Forsyth
Grisham
Heyer
MacLean
Sherlock Holmes
An example of full list Agatha Cristie
4_50 From Paddington – Agatha Christie.epub
A Caribbean Mystery – Agatha Christie.epub
A Murder Is Announced – Agatha Christie.epub
A Pocketful of Rye – Agatha Christie.epub
After the Funeral – Agatha Christie.epub
An Autobiography – Agatha Christie.epub
And Then There Were None (AKA Ten Little Niggers) – Agatha Christie.epub
Appointment With Death – Agatha Christie.epub
At Bertram’s Hotel – Agatha Christie.epub
Best Detective Stories of Agatha Christie – Agatha Christie.epub
Black Coffee – Agatha Christie.epub
By the Pricking of My Thumbs – Agatha Christie.epub
Cards on the Table – Agatha Christie.epub
Cat Among the Pigeons – Agatha Christie.epub
Crooked House – Agatha Christie.epub
Curtain_ Poirot’s Last Case – Agatha Christie.epub
Dead Man’s Folly – Agatha Christie.epub
Death Comes as the End – Agatha Christie.epub
Death in the Clouds (AKA Death In the Air) – Agatha Christie.epub
Death on the Nile – Agatha Christie.epub
Destination Unknown (AKA So Many Steps to Death) – Agatha Christie.epub
Dumb Witness (AKA Poirot Loses A Client) – Agatha Christie.epub
Elephants Can Remember – Agatha Christie.epub
Endless Night – Agatha Christie.epub
Evil Under the Sun – Agatha Christie.epub
Five Little Pigs – Agatha Christie.epub
Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie.epub
Hercule Poirot’s Casebook – Agatha Christie.epub
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas – Agatha Christie.epub
Hickory Dickory Dock – Agatha Christie.epub
Lord Edgware Dies (AKA Thirteen At Dinner) – Agatha Christie.epub
Miss Marple_ The Complete Short Stories – Agatha Christie.epub
Miss Marple’s Final Cases – Agatha Christie.epub
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead – Agatha Christie.epub
Murder in Mesopotamia – Agatha Christie.epub
Murder in the Mews (AKA Dead Man’s Mirror) – Agatha Christie.epub
Murder Is Easy AKA Easy to Kill) – Agatha Christie.epub
Murder on the Links – Agatha Christie.epub
Murder on the Orient Express (AKA Murder in the Calais Coach) – Agatha Christie.epub
N or M_ – Agatha Christie.epub
Nemesis – Agatha Christie.epub
On, Off – Colleen McCullough.lrf
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – Agatha Christie.epub
Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie.epub
Parker Pyne Investigates – Agatha Christie.epub
Partners in Crime – Agatha Christie.epub
Passenger to Frankfurt – Agatha Christie.epub
Peril at End House – Agatha Christie.epub
Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie.epub
Poirot’s Early Cases – Agatha Christie.epub
Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories – Agatha Christie.epub
Sad Cypress – Agatha Christie.epub
Sleeping Murder – Agatha Christie.epub
Sparkling Cyanide – Agatha Christie.epub
Spider’s Web – Agatha Christie.epub
Taken at the Flood (AKA There Is a Tide) – Agatha Christie.epub
The A.B.C. Murders – Agatha Christie.epub
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and Other Stories – Agatha Christie.epub
The Big Four – Agatha Christie.epub
The Body in the Library – Agatha Christie.epub
The Clocks – Agatha Christie.epub
The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories – Agatha Christie.epub
The Hollow – Agatha Christie.epub
The Hound of Death – Agatha Christie.epub
The Labours Of Hercules – Agatha Christie.epub
The Listerdale Mystery – Agatha Christie.epub
The Man in the Brown Suit – Agatha Christie.epub
The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side – Agatha Christie.epub
The Moving Finger – Agatha Christie.epub
The Murder at the Vicarage – Agatha Christie.epub
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie.epub
The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie.epub
The Mysterious Mr. Quin – Agatha Christie.epub
The Mystery of the Blue Train – Agatha Christie.epub
The Pale Horse – Agatha Christie.epub
The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories – Agatha Christie.epub
The Secret Adversary – Agatha Christie.epub
The Secret of Chimneys – Agatha Christie.epub
The Seven Dials Mystery – Agatha Christie.epub
The Sittaford Mystery (AKA Murder at Hazelmoor) – Agatha Christie.epub
The Thirteen Problems (AKA The Tuesday Club Murders) – Agatha Christie.epub
The Unexpected Guest – Agatha Christie.epub
They Came to Baghdad – Agatha Christie.epub
They Do It With Mirrors (AKA Murder with Mirrors) – Agatha Christie.epub
Third Girl – Agatha Christie.epub
Three Act Tragedy (AKA Murder in Three Acts) – Agatha Christie.epub
Three Blind Mice (AKA The Mouse Trap) – Agatha Christie.epub
Towards Zero – Agatha Christie.epub
While the Light Lasts – Agatha Christie.epub
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans – Agatha Christie.epub
ROFLMAO. That grade of gutter sophistry isn’t worth the time of day. Go work it out for yourself, you have a browser and a search engine. It’s all in the plain light of day.
The mystery for me is why they’re so open about it, when that’s so obviously diplomatically counterproductive.
Oh, I see, …….., it was just like Libya
Stanning for Putin is understandable. Stanning for Xi is off the planet. Stanning for Gadaffi is full retard given the La Belle and Lockerbie bombings.
Maybe the Assads shouldn’t have enabled ISIS in its early days and the Taliban shouldn’t have hosted Al Qaida. FAFO.
This is the level of craziness you are defending to stop the West from declining, to save Christendom and democracy?
Loopy stuff.
FOREIGN POLICY
Our Most Serious National Security Threat Isn’t Russian Nukes In Space, It’s Intelligence Agencies In Washington
The hysteria on Capitol Hill over Russian nukes in space was a cheap ploy to ram through Ukraine aid and kill FISA reform.
It was a busy day in Washington on Wednesday as the intelligence bureaucracy tried to foment a national security panic over Russian nukes in space in hopes of ramming through the Ukraine aid package and killing reforms designed to curb its power to spy on Americans.
Lest you think that sounds crazy, consider the timing of the panic provocations, which came almost immediately after House Speaker Mike Johnson said he and other Republicans weren’t going to be “rushed” into approving the $61 billion aid package for Ukraine.
It also came at the precise moment — just coincidentally! — that the House was debating reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to expire in April, that would end warrantless surveillance of Americans, which of course the White House and intelligence agencies oppose.
All of it just goes to show that the most serious threat facing America isn’t Russian nukes in space or overseas terrorist plots, it’s the political class in Washington and our intelligence agencies that think they’re above the law.
Here’s what happened.
You haven’t been reading the news lately have you?
Record 18 NATO states expected to meet 2% defense spending threshold this year (14 Feb)
Poland, Sweden and the Baltic States are going harder, as you might expect. Finland maybe also, I haven’t seen much on them. I agree with you though, since defense spending is different from combat capability, which Europe has been enwokifying for some time now.
On the other hand Russia hasn’t been able to beat Ukraine, and the war has stalemated. So the chance that they could invade anyone else right now is laughable. But Putin has certainly stirred up the kiddies. Trolling? I don’t know, but the noisy stuff coming out of Russia threatening to conquer everywhere and nuke everything is quite interesting. Why are they doing it? I have no idea.
Try Suva.
30 years ago there was a policeman on every corner.
Now there’s a petty criminal on every corner.
It’s not just the West that is going backwards.
The archives of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany have been open to researchers since the mid 1960’s. In the event of a German victory, Great Britain was to be stripped of her colonies and the Royal Navy, and subjected to crippling reparations, designed to prevent her ever posing a threat ever again. Australia would have found herself forced to contribute to those reparations. There may not have been a physical occupation, but Australia would not have been immune from the consequences of a German victory.
It is almost funny but breathtakingly deceptive to try to claim that Russia can’t launch its arsenal of “conventional” nukes BUT it also has “space nukes”.
Fool us once, shame on you, fool us twice, we won’t get fooled again…
“Roger – we still had great big maps of the British Empire in our classroom in 1970. But a few years later all had gone. I suspect Whitlam purged it, that would’ve been in character.”
Bruce, I am about as far from a Whitlam-o-phile as you can get, but he at least could put two sentences together, that were grammatically correct.
He could also frame an argument.
Compare that to our current intellectually challenged PM, or any of the front bench really, especially the Minister for Energy and Climate Change.
Chalk and cheese.
Size, I think, is the difference.
The idea of total Ukrainian victory is delusional
<a href="“>The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 26, contains this invaluable insight: “As dogs return to their vomit, so fools repeat their folly.
You see those who are wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for fools than for them.”
Invaluable because, in connection with the Russia-Ukraine War, the passage powerfully illuminates the current debate about Ukraine’s future strategic prospects.
The past few months have witnessed the dog returning to its vomit in the form of any number of efforts to once again make the case that Ukraine still has a path to total victory in its war against Russia. In professional journals, on influential websites and across the full spectrum of media outlets, observers, analysts and pundits alike continue to inform us that, yes, there is a way for Ukraine to prevail over Russia, expelling the latter from all of its territory, including Crimea.
One might claim that these arguments are being advanced because the facts on the ground warrant them; because the shifting geopolitical and battlefield realities clearly indicate that the military balance is tipping in Ukraine’s favor. As Ukraine acquires more weapons (and more sophisticated weapons), it will inevitably achieve the kind of tactical advantages that will propel it first to operational and then to strategic breakthroughs, culminating in total victory. All that’s required is one more mobilization of Ukrainian youth, one more tranche of Western financial aid, one more delivery of American, French or British wonder weapons.
But the strategic, operational and tactical realities of the war simply don’t support any version of this argument. Ukraine is not prevailing at the tactical level — if anything, Russia’s advantage at there is growing rather than diminishing, as Russia outpaces Ukraine in adapting to the evolving realities of the battlefield. The net result? Russia not only remains capable of sustaining the kind of defense-in-depth that has completely frustrated all Ukrainian offensive efforts, but is increasingly able to mount successful offensives in places like Avdiivka.
In short, Russia is winning the war and there is little to suggest that any foreseeable political, economic, tactical or technological developments are likely to alter that fundamental reality.
So why are we seeing arguments about an ultimate Ukrainian battlefield triumph, in the face of all the devastatingly contradictory evidence?
Well, applying Occam’s razor — the principle that “other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones”
— I would suggest that the delusional belief that there is a pathway to total victory for Ukraine is based less on evolving military or geopolitical realities than on a simple psychological dynamic, one best summed up in the concept of “commitment escalation.”
According to this concept, individuals or groups sometimes exhibit a tendency to persist with a failing argument, even as that argument becomes increasingly untenable in light of the facts.
This behavior is marked above all by an adherence to prior commitments — sunk costs, as the economists might put it — regardless of their present plausibility or rationality. It is a psychological dysfunction.
Applying this concept to Ukraine explains the delusional belief that despite all of Ukraine’s devastating defeats and strategic setbacks, victory is just around the corner.
Those who committed publicly to the view that Ukraine was destined to inflict a decisive defeat on Russia during the much-heralded but ultimately failed spring/summer “counteroffensive” in 2023 have irrationally doubled down on that public commitment.
They have, in other words, escalated their commitment even as the facts on the ground dictate that this faith in Ukraine’s ultimate total victory is simply baseless, and that a rational person would adjust their views in light of those facts.
Put slightly differently, the more dire Ukraine’s strategic prospects have become, the more these true believers have felt compelled to concoct imagined pathways to total Ukrainian victory — despite the increasingly incontrovertible evidence that no such pathway exists.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington
Cohenite:
Beer Goggles, Cohenite. Beer Goggles.
Reminds me of one from the Oz a couple days ago.
Baltic states: Dragon’s teeth, mines and 1000 bunkers await Vladimir Putin (15 Feb, not paywalled)
Add that Estonia has been shoveling support to Ukraine massively on a per capita basis. The Baltics seem to’ve decided that Putin meant what he said in his Tsar Pete speech.
Gee, the collapse of Avdeevka is total. It’s now a rout.
You are permitted to walk and chew gum simultaneously.
I could equally say that most of what Biden does or doesn’t do has very little impact on me, so …
Putin got his headline? I hope not too many Russian soldiers died for it.
. Texas 7. One of the grearest jailbreaks evrer.. The intelligenge and acumen of George Rivas the ringlrader. is next level. There are vids of him talking to media. He should be CEO of some big company.. It is a strange world.
Bruce, you made the claim that Putin said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire. I asked you to substantiate this claim. You haven’t been able to and it isn’t my job to do it for you.
You really ought to do the right thing and withdraw your assertion that Putin said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire, given you have not been able to substantiate this.
Incidentally, the other reason I say you should withdraw the claim is because I know for a fact he never said this. If he did, it would be dead easy to provide at the very least a verbatim quote, because every Western corporate media outlet would be parrotting it relentlessly.
Instead, they make sly and deceptive insinuations attributing this intent to Putin, and thank you for posting a selection of articles above proving this point. Consuming these is how people such as yourself come to believe Putin said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire. And you’re surprised when you are asked to provide evidence that this was ever said and subsequently aren’t able to. Surely he must have said that after everything you’ve read about him, right? Well…turns out he didn’t. If I were you, I’d be questioning my sources if they’d led me to such an erroneous conclusion. But hey, that’s just me.
m0nty had the same issue when he blurted out that Putin said he wanted to recreate the USSR. When I challenged him as I challenged you, he pretty much responded in the same way. Obfuscation, posting a few corporate media articles that proved nothing, then told me to join the dots or whatever, and finally he pretended the entire exchange had never happened. You haven’t got to that last phase yet. I invite you not to go down that path and instead consider how you came to believe what you wrote.
Essay
Can Ukraine Still Win?
As Congress continues to delay aid and Volodymyr Zelensky replaces his top commander, military experts debate the possible outcomes
Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations.
The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts.
And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice.
They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans.
They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.
The arguments were painful and significant.
Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost?
Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be?
The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?
There was a third option: neither.
The dominant factor was the Russian military.
It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war.
It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped.
Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death.
They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines.
“People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”
Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common.
The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes.
“In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened.
In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France.
They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.
“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”
Very Long and Interesting Essay!
Boambee John gets it.
PS: if you want to be anything more than a fairweather nationalist, you have to be prepared to fight and die for your country.
Yes, I remember too; the maps were still there but the empire had gone.
You may have missed my historical reference – the fall of Singapore.
PS: if you want to be anything more than a fairweather nationalist, you have to be prepared to fight and die for your country.
and also do a job that makes the economy strong and independent
I did. Dog balls are less bleeding obvious. I can’t help it if you want to stick your fingers in your ears and put a bag over your head. Sheesh.
As I said, I know what Putin, Lavrov and Medvedev have been saying, what I don’t know is why they’re saying it when it is obviously so counterproductive. There’s got to be a reason.
cohenite
This is just another aspect of the way Islam enforces compliance with their religion against the laws of their ‘host’ country.
They do it with food, and now are showing their contempt for us by picking on the sightless.
At what point do we fight back?
The evidence is every war Putin has engaged in, his insistence that Ukraine and other areas should be part of Russia (or “really” are), the blatant murder of his rivals and rigged elections, the false flag terrorist operation*, himself at the helm of a kakistocracy and the fact he was a Lt Col in the KGB who worked with the Stasi.
*See the book written by Litvinenko (dec’d, almost certainly murdered), supported by General Lebed (dec’d, also likely murdered)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_Up_Russia
Roger – I did see it. We were committed by then, although that was also when we transitioned from the UK sphere to the US one. And Macarthur 🙁 .
We did participate in the Commonwealth Division in Korea though.
Oh, wow! Point proven! 2% of GDP, my goodness. These people leave Hitler and Roosevelt in the dust with such an epic rearmament program.
Bruce, if the Europeans were genuinely worried about a Russian invasion, they would revert to a full wartime economy and mobilisation. They’d be requisitioning factories and it’d be all guns, no butter. They have a lot of catching up to do, after all. Instead, they cower under the increasingly flimsy NATO umbrella blowing raspberries at Russia whilst sending Ukraine the few weapons they have left in their arsenals that nevertheless kill Russian soldiers.
They aren’t scared of Russia in the slightest. They simply want to continue to outsource their defence expenditure to Washington. Hence their herculean effort to meet the mandatory NATO-imposed 2% GDP military spend they’ve ignored for so long. Trump might get elected this year after all – better cover off on that. What to spend it on? Doesn’t really matter as long as you hit the 2%!
In the Great War, what was Australia’s trade position with the U.K. at the time?
Re. WWII: Had we not sent divisions overseas, would they have possessed (a) the equipment required for home defense/fighting in Papua and New Guinea, and (b) the experience needed – especially with NCOs and junior leaders, for the same as (a)?
Yes, we ‘lost’ the equivalent of a full division in Singapore/Malaya, and the northern islands, but many of those from the remaining three divisions who saw service in the Middle East were, once home, transferred to command positions in militia units, where there experience was invaluable.
Disappointing to see you go full m0nty, Bruce. And throwing a bit of denial into the mix, too.
and also do a job that makes the economy strong and independent
Which is why we need to ditch Net Zero and much of the rest of Green bullshit, along with red and black tape.
Anyone going to die to defend lands claimed under native title?
With the major ports & major cities in enemy hands, & thus zero access to any industrial tertiary products, and zero access to markets, the countryside of Australia would have faced a choice of reverting to subsistence lifestyle – while waiting to be slowly mopped up, or caving in. In parts of the country the lifestyle would have very swiftly reverted to pre-1788.
Yes, that was my point.
Which is why we need to ditch Net Zero and much of the rest of Green bullshit
which I believe exists to destroy prosperity for regular citizens- Tasmania was a trial run with Brown turd spearheading it.
OCO – You are delusional. I can’t help it when you reject the sources I provide, which are widely accepted and are being acted upon to the detriment of many national budgets. Well believe what you like, it’s still more or less a free country.
The Chesty Blonde hasn’t been making a fool of herself and even bigger fools of us this year. The situation hasn’t changed so what is happening. Media been brought off? again. Those scumbags still loose in the community. When are we going to get adult politicians. A school lunch shop is beyond most of them.
None more so than French Commander in Chief General Gamelin, who didn’t think the Germans would come through the Ardennes.
He was later a prisoner in Castle Itter, the 1945 battle for which is often dubbed “the strangest battle of WWII.”
Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald. “Climate change is a threat to our climate, obviously.”
Looking at the front page of the Oz, I am reminded of my Mum saying , “Mutton done up as lamb” and Dad would chime in “:More like mutton done up as hogget”.
A school lunch shop is beyond most of them.
Of course it is having never had a real job or wanted for anything. Quite an aristocratic bunch in power in canbra right now.
Media been brought off?
doesn’t have to be- the canbra press gallery is marxist open borders- exhibit A the Tingle abomination
Yes, by people like you who have already convinced themselves that something that isn’t true, is. The sources you provided don’t actually prove what you claimed. I asked you for the speech or written instruction or whatever in which Putin stated he wanted to recreate the Russian empire, which is what you attributed to him. You can’t provide this evidence because it doesn’t exist. (I’ve no doubt you’ve searched for it.) Yet you just can’t accept this plain reality. It’s really rather remarkable.
Makka:
Anyone with an ounce of imagination can predict what would happen if Russia took over Europe – and the Europeans would collaborate from the sidelines as Russia solved Europe’s “Islamic Problem” for them.
Quite so.
You’re not very different from m0nty on this issue, Bruce. In some ways worse. You’re cleverer than he is so can spin bullshit in a more sophisticated and convincing manner. Unfortunately, it remains bullshit.
Releasing violent criminals into the community is the latest fashion imported from the US.
Um, buy a mirror.
Lefty European governments are being forced to increase military spending when that is anathema for lefties. Not even Trump could get them to do that. Maybe Putin is trying some sort of diplomatic jujitsu to get them to spend themselves into collapse. But if I was Russia I would not be waking the Europeans up from their 80 years of slumber, it tends not to go well when that happens.
RTWT.
Bruce, bottom line is you claimed Putin said he wanted to recreate the Russian empire. You can’t provide any evidence he ever said that. You should retract your claim. Unfortunately, it seems you won’t.
Tom, the problem is not willing to die to save your loved ones, its saving the perennially lazy, useless so n so’s that I’m not willing to save. I’m sick and tired of paying for them. They are of no benefit to the country.
Considerable debate today re Putin and his plans. Instigates passionate special pleading & different reading of the evidence. All good for interesting reading on the Cat.
I suspect that the Tucker Carlson interview has had quite a significant effect on opinions in the West re Putin and contemporary Russia.
Btw there’s a bit of speculation around the traps that Putin will do some sort of mobilization after the election next month is out of the way. Maybe the stuff in the media is related to preparing the Russian population in readiness for that.
And Bruce, when I say “evidence”, I don’t mean some purported Putin mind-reader’s claims about what Putin *really* thinks. I mean proper evidence. A verifiable verbatim quote would do. It would be easy to find if it existed.
The evidence that the Germans were “willing to talk and all go home” is non-existent, at least before they re-commenced unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, not 1916. And even then, their price to “talk and go home” would have probably too high for France and Britain. See the treaty of Brest-Litovsk for the minimal terms that could have been demanded.
And you didn’t read (or didn’t comprehend) my final point, about northern Australia. See again Brest-Litovsk.
Just caught the tram down Swanston st. Worse than packed sardines. Having a pram added to the tetris challenge. Son’s place is two stops outside the free zone. Most passengers do not pay.
PS, we did own Papua at that time.
I did so. Take the bag off your head and look. Not only Poot but his guys, as I also linked. I doubt you bothered to click those links though. I can’t do anything if you refuse to see the nose in front of your face.
Thye would provide a useful counter to the Mueslis.
Always makes me laugh when certain parties complain of how harsh the Treaty of Versailles was…
Dover
How about between Australia and Japanese ports?
Just caught the tram down Swanston st. Worse than packed sardines. Having a pram added to the tetris challenge. Son’s place is two stops outside the free zone. Most passengers do not pay.
ha ha yes like Russia roulette-Jeff’s shed’s just out of the free zone too. The revenue protection officers can just materialize sometimes
You mean the combined efforts and resources of US, UK, NATO, Ukraine still haven’t been able to dislodge Russia from Ukraine.
Another Bakhmut style debacle is just a stalemate? How many more male Ukrainians still breathing are left that can be chewed up by this “stalemate”?
https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1758255745517420796
With the naval assets of Britain and Germany under their control, Germany would not have had to “overrun” Australia, just present their terms. Losing northern Australia would have been likely, and Australia could have done sfa about it.
the countryside of Australia would have faced a choice of reverting to subsistence lifestyle – while waiting to be slowly mopped up, or caving in. In parts of the country the lifestyle would have very swiftly reverted to pre-1788.
I’ve little doubt things might have been tuff .. but pre-1788 .. Ha ha! .. no one could seriously say that normal folk who were used to life with late19th/early 20th century technology would revert to “neanderthal” willingly ..
No, you are now lying. You know full well you posted no such thing. You posted a few articles. Why don’t you post the quotes they contain which purport to say what you attribute to him, ie. “I’m going to restore the Russian empire” or similar.
As well as freeing up money for the strained defence budget, selling off Defence properties and converting them into residential property could help ease the dire housing shortages in the nation’s capital cities.
Luv how the media manage to insert “housing” into any or all stories these dayz .. it’s a reporting magic trick ..! sell land, ease shortage .. without any mention of the, actual, years between the “for sale” sign and “fit for occupation” .. it’s all slanted towards .. “sold next week, built & occupied the week after” .. crisis over …..!
And Russia hasn’t even taken the gloves off yet. There is a massive military buildup going on behind the Russian frontiers. I don’t say this because I love Putin or Russia. It’s just reality. I see no point in denying it. If the inevitable upcoming Russian offensive gets stopped in its tracks and the Russians get routed by the Ukrainians, I wouldn’t shy away from that in the slightest.
“The Senate Republicans continuously re-elect McConnell as their leader”
Mitch “I can have a stroke and sleep on my feet but I’m smarter than Joe” McConnell
miltonf
Feb 17, 2024 2:48 PM
A school lunch shop is beyond most of them.
Yes. They couldn’t organise a piss up in a Brewery.
No mention either of re-zoning or environmental clean-up. Many Defence facilities date back to a time when environmental care was (at the best) in its infancy.
No, no- it’s a stalemate dover. Just like strategically insignificant Bakhmut.
Seriously though, it looks like a cauldron on the maps. The pincer horns are closing in and the Ukes are fleeing on foot under Russian artillery and rocket fire. More bloody slaughter, while Biden grins and rubs his hands gleefully with the win for the money launderers. And extra $61 Billion? Should be able to buy a few coffins and artificial limbs with that.
Why would ships destined for Japan from Australia traverse the South China Sea?
Nice plan but how to execute. The Germans might have conceivably been able to subdue the continent, forced the Brits into a humiliating withdrawal in what would have been a clear strategic defeat, but that is a far, far cry from stripping them of their colonies and the Royal Navy. Even if evicted from Europe, Britain could continue to maintain the blockade of Germany and the Royal Navy would have continued to be the dominant naval force in the world.
Digger, you are right. That ghastly man has destroyed the Republican Party just so he can remain the Mini-Me to whichever Democrat warlord is chosen by their elites. The US is done.
That German plan for a defeated Britain is redolent of the post-Bismarck German mentality, unable to conceive that conquering territory and then holding onto that conquered territory are two very different propositions.
Johnny Rotten
Feb 17, 2024 3:36 PM
“Couldn’t get a root standing in the foyer of a whorehouse with a bunch of hundred dollar notes in his hand”
Very little I say.
Still is there a site such as this with Russians freely ranting against the Vlad?
Is there a news station like Sky criticising Vlad?
Are there blocks of citations pushing against the government corruption like the US?
From Vicki,” interesting reading on the Cat today”. Its interesting every day except when the children are playing. I like how everyone has something to say even if I don’t necessarily agree but gives me pause for consideration. I doubt anyone has changed my mind but definitely changed the way I think about things. This has to be the best blog around.
This government is giving mixed messages about defence. On one hand it is talking up the tough talk with AUKUS and new equipment but on the other all it’s strategic moves like Smith’s/Houston’s reorg are nothing more than deep cost cutting moves with window dressing they are doing something.
Yes lets sell off prime harbour real estate and headquarters estate that may be needed soon… I didn’t even think of the contaminants angle, PFAS anyone especially around Garden Is.
Also like Queensland state Labor is notorious for, watch which developers pick up the spoils.
Yes.
Don’t know.
More than likely.
Armchair Warlord:
RTWT.
Yep.
I don’t get it.
If we can’t criticise China or Russa because the west isn’t perfect then conversely we can’t criticise the US and Briten because we we have problems of our own.
Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad idea to focus on local issues only.
Iron ore carriers from West Australia, Japanese imports to WA?
OCO
One of the causes of tension between Britain and Germany before 1914 was German naval ambitions (which were not unrelated to German Imperial/colonial ambitions).
PS, pushing the British out of the continent without a treaty would have left the war to continue, particularly the blockade of Germany. If Britain wanted out, there would have been a price.
We can only speculate at this distance in time, but a clear defeat of Britain on the continent would lead either to a continuing war (see 1940) or a treaty, which would have included a price (see Brest-Litovsk).
RokDok
PFAS would be likely to be the least of the problems at Garden Island.
I wonder what has been shoe-horned into “defence budgets” to get it to 2%.
Aid to African despots via the UN to help “climate refugees” whose parents haven’t yet been born?
It is all about the the Spratly Islands. Oil is oil folks.
Um…
Didn’t know Wix nukes your old websites when they upgrade the plug ins and tech too…
🙁
Their AI, is stupid as ever. The short PCI bus!
No I’m not lying, I gave links to Lavrov and another guy talking about Moldova and Kazakhstan. You do know who Lavrov is don’t you? The Kazakhs have not been happy with Russia ever since they said they’d like the Russian bits back please. Moldova has been antsy since the FSB had been caught playing silly buggers in their elections and Transdniester has three Russian BTGs garrisoning it. So far neither Moldova nor Ukraine have seen a reason to eliminate them, at least not yet. There was concern that the Russian Navy would bulk them up, but the Ukies sinking of a fair chunk of it has prevented that.
As long as you leave Queensland out of it.
PFAS is basically harmless. Billions of people are stuffed to the gills with it, because it’s a degradation product of Teflon. All those wonderful Teflon frying pans we used for fifty years after NASA invented the stuff. People have been dying in their hundreds of millions! Not.
It’s a beat up as bad as climate crap. In any case PFAS is slowly excreted by the body. Half life is about 5-10 years from the data I saw.
Chuckle, Roger.
Albanese finally finds a foreign policy topic he can speak unequivocally on.
Thanks, Vlad.
Microplastics and nanoparticles are two more BS scientisms. Not an iota of data to support them being harmful. If nanoparticles were dangerous painters would be dying in droves, because that’s what paint is made out of: TiO2 nanoparticles.
These silly scares are a symptom of the scientific ignorance of the population. One tends to be scared of mysterious stuff you don’t understand and have no skills or education that might enable you to find out anything about.
Yes lets sell off prime harbour real estate and headquarters estate that may be needed soon… I didn’t even think of the contaminants angle, PFAS anyone especially around Garden Is.
Ground contaminants only become an issue for selected sites .. paper bags take care of the rest .. worked at Berger Paints, Rhodes thru the 1980s .. most of the open ground storage area(s) (about 50% of the whole site) were littered with leaking chemical drum seapage ( lotza years involved) yet after closure & demolition (including the nearby Union Carbide factory) no probs selling and being developed for IKEA superstore/shopping centre/residential blocks …….
What are you hinting at BoN. Woodworkers, plasterers and painters don’t need Masks?
If the Chinese were actually blockading commercial transits across the SC Sea, they could simply use the Makassar Strait and east seaboard of the Philippines to get to and from Japan.
In Alice Springs again for several days and a variety of purposes, including but not limited to smallgoodsery.
Coolish, for February. 36 degrees.
I also note that Titus has been getting a workout this arvo.
Snoozer Kelly has an interesting article on the state of fiscal dysfunction in the Federation in the Weekend Paywallian. Would seem to correspond with my casual observation there are a lot of Range Rovers and Porsches on the streets of Perf. Had a beer with an old mate from law school who casually says he is the executor of a billion dollar estate. Nothing too complicated – all real estate apparently. Even keeping a list of a billion dollars of property would be a full time job.
Steve Price: Victoria’s blackouts a glimpse of future in climate-change obsessed state
As Victoria’s energy grid collapsed on Tuesday afternoon, 530,000 homes were left with no power, train lines were shut down, schools closed and we lost 550 sets of traffic lights. Welcome to the brave new world of energy transition.
HERALDSUN.COM.AU03:07
This week, every Victorian got a glimpse into a future under a climate-change obsessed state government.
At lunchtime as the temperature hit a – not unusual for February – top of 36C and the northerly winds broke 100kmh, the energy grid collapsed.
By late afternoon an estimated 530,000 Victorians had no power. Major train lines were shut down, medical centres were forced onto generators, schools and kindergartens in many areas were forced to close and we lost 550 sets of traffic lights.
Welcome to the brave new world of energy transition. Imagine if you can what Tuesday would have been like if the climate crusaders had their way and our coal fired power stations didn’t exist. Tuesday’s winds were so strong the fields of wind turbines would have been turned off, rendered useless.
Victoria was covered by dark storm clouds as unseasonal hail and rain swept the state. Who knows what solar power would have been generated. The state would have presumably been totally reliant on Tasmania’s hydro-generated electricity.
Our state is being pushed down an energy road we might never recover from. Ageing coal-fired power stations like Loy Yang A and Yallourn are demonised and targets have been set for their closure.
Problem is, the rush to renewables is slow, expensive and technology still hasn’t worked out how to deliver reliable base load power.
Even the Australian Energy Market Operator is predicting power reliability gaps as soon as this year and more serious gaps from 2028 onwards.
We are right now hanging by a thread with the state government foolishly chasing ever earlier net zero emissions targets. They want a state that will have a population exceeding six million people to have zero emissions by 2045 – dragged forward recently by five years.
More worryingly their ambition to cut emissions by 50 per cent of what they are today by 2030.
If you need a fright, look up the Victorian government’s climate change website and read the gibberish attached to their ambitions – and remember this from a government that is broke paying more than $25m a day in interest payments on borrowed money.
The government says its ambitious net zero targets will “create new jobs in clean energy” without saying what those jobs are, plus jobs in “land restoration” and “zero emissions transport.”
Does that mean putting conductors back on solar powered trams or planting trees on the old sites where we get power from, the three coal fired power stations? Labor don’t make this very clear.
Then the website makes this remarkable claim that the zero targets will mean cleaner air, lower energy bills and greater biodiversity.
Forgive me but this expensive transition to wind and solar, with hundreds of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines needed to be built, will do the opposite to bringing down power bills. As for biodiversity, tell that to the farmers battling to keep these power lines off their farms.
The fairytale gets worse with a claim that the Victorian economy will be $63bn bigger than it is now by 2070. Does anyone seriously believe predictions 46 years out have any validity at all? And they then go on to suggest that this $63bn economy will attract some of the $US130 trillion of global private finance for renewables. Really!
Then after Tuesday’s hot windy day that knocked out almost 550,000 homes and businesses and the economic loss that came with that weather event, Victoria’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio was asked about the resilience Victoria’s power grid. She pointed to a 2021 review after similar storms smashed the Dandenong Ranges.
Her response was that the Government had accepted all the recommendations of the review but that a national solution was required for energy resilience.
“Poles and wires just don’t stop at the borders,” she said.
What she should have honestly said was that the recommendations included burying transmission lines underground, but Victoria is so broke Canberra would have to pay for it.
As for the federal government, its Climate Change Minister – the dangerous Chris Bowen – pointed to a $20bn taxpayer funded Rewiring the Nation fund created to accommodate his rush to wind and solar power that’s not even been built yet. He was dodging D’Ambrosio’s outstretched hand to fund fixing the existing network of ageing power lines.
Bowen then in typical style went on to blame climate change for Victoria’s grid collapse on Tuesday. He said: “We are experiencing more frequent and more severe extreme weather events due to the changing climate.”
It was 36C with isolated pockets of very strong wind – hardly severe or extreme unless you were in the eye of the storm.
He then made a bizarre claim about giving network operators “multiple options for rapidly diverting electricity around different parts of the grid and between states as needed.”
Sorry, don’t we do that already as evidenced by Victoria drawing down power from Tasmania on Tuesday?
This bloke talks waffle.
The bottom line is we are charging down a road that will make energy supply less reliable and more expensive despite what the politicians are telling you.
In Victoria it’s worse with the state turning its back on coal and gas and refusing to even discuss nuclear energy. There could be no better location for a nuclear power plant than the Latrobe Valley. It would provide real, not imagined, jobs during construction and the ongoing operations.
Tuesday gave us a glimpse of what life without baseload coal generated electricity and super reliable gas will be like – expensive and unreliable!
A bit like the politicians feeding us this fantasy world of renewables.
I’d still use masks in high exposure work. Clogging up your lungs isn’t good, even if the particles aren’t especially harmful.
Wood dust has all sorts of chemicals in it, since trees tend not to like being eaten by insects. Plasterers are dealing with gypsum! And we Cats know about gypsum.
That’s the other thing, ordinary dust contains nanoparticles. We’ve evolved to live with dust. But silicosis is a real disease, so you do need to take care, even though we’ve been breathing silica in dust for as long as we’ve been human.
The quality of bubble wrap is degenerating. Half the bubbles on the wrap I get on my cigars won’t pop. They sort of ooze into adjacent bubbles.
It isn’t good enough.
Iron ore carriers from West Australia, Japanese imports to WA?
Just looked at my globe of the world. Port Hedland to Japan goes east of the Philippines
on pretty much a Great Circle route
Can I blame the boomers for something?
The boomers did ruin the finance industry.
First, it was the used car salesmen (Financial Planners) propping themselves up as being as educated as straight economics, accounting or finance majors.
Then they made RG146-compliant courses irrelevant for FP, introduced a professional mentoring year like law…and for all advisers, made RG146 no longer relevant for new advisers.
Then they by regulation, murked a whole swathe of degrees and emasculated a whole heap of relevant ones…which can be cured by doing the Ad. Dip of Fin. Planning…FMD.
So now because of the idiotic labour party led by Gillard and then Albanese, we have financial services being led by people with cookie-cutter coursework “qualifications” and experience in…upselling managed funds to unsophisticated clients.
Do you want to know why everything is shit, dumbed down and expensive now? Read what I wrote.
You have a remarkably insouciant attitude to overt breaches of UNCLOS, but it is not that different to your attitude to the Houthi attacks in the Gulf of Aden/Bab el Mandeb.
Which, according to JC, we were lucky to even get a fleeting glimpse of due to the enormity of the Carlsoni’s cranium.
Well, where else is Tucker supposed to store his enormous brain? In his house sized bottomage?
And I want calli to come back. I have the impression she was upset by Lizzie calling her a coward for not joining in the anti-anti- semitism hysteria, when calli’s position was entirely clear and sane. Lizzie has gone to CL’s site and has also vanished from this one. I can live with Lizzie going, but I really miss calli. A very sensible and lucid person who improved this site.
You can’t blame a whole generation for anything, dotty. Just like I can’t blame a whole generation of GenXers for being whingeing whiney layabout Xbox addicted NAFI;s (no ambition and f***all initiative).
Banks have been collapsing since forever. The reasons might be different but the effect is the same. Look, I like to blame the boomers as much as the next guy, but that is a bit of a stretch. The entire Financial Planning “industry” is a function of ticket clipping and the complexity of Australia’s tax and transfer payments. Boomers might be partly responsible for that but that is a question for another day.
Shaterzzz know the place well.
I lived for one of dads posting cycles across the river late ’70’s to early ’80’s. If I remember correctly there was an oil refinery in there as well. As a young boy the flaring tower fascinated me. You could hear the heavy engineering going across the river on a quiet night, usually when I was heading to the outdoor dunny on our place. Also the oil spill at one stage that kept us away from the Parramatta R for a spell. I remember swimming off the boat ramp at the end of Wharf rd a few times as a Scout, we had sail boats. Shudder, prob full of heavy metals. Few sharks though. Funny thing is with all the heavy industry there was no shortage of mangroves.
The scales fall from my eyes.
https://democracyforsale.net/
Biggest corpo donor in Australia
Banking and Finance Industry
$86.5 mn from 2013 – 2022
I sort of can with a degree of fairness because they had the leadership positions. Let’s say it’s 80% – 90% fair.
Now they’re retired, you can blame generation X.
I’ve read the blueprint for QLD’s renewable ebergy “supergrid” presently under construction.
The interconnectors with NSW are only mentioned twice and that’s in the context of importing power during adverse weather events in QLD and a shortage of stored electricity here.
Other than that, I don’t think the boffins designing the supergrid up here are anticipating being part of any “national solution” that might address VIC’s future electricity shortages because they’re not anticipating having much surplus power stored in the system to export.
I can live with Lizzie going, but I really miss calli. A very sensible and lucid person who improved this site.
agree- Calli and Cassie are great contributors.
Iirc, calli mentioned going on a cruise in the South Pacific (Vanuatu?).
I hope she’ll return after that as I’m missing her presence too.
The glorious chromium and osmium ions killed off the sharks and kept you safe.
Intergenerational banter can be cathartic when both parties see it as way to point out extremes and don’t take it personally. But when the government through its MSN proxies is actively pitting us against eachouther it maybe time to circle the wagons as it were.
Hint – there won’t be much “stored” energy anywhere in the system. I don’t think you’ll be hearing much about pumped hydro after the bills for Snowy 2.0 come in.
Re ‘supergrid’ they’re spending money on this rubbish as if money is no object.
I’m being realistic. They won’t prevent innocent passage onthe SC sea as they depend upon maritime trade.
I can live with Lizzie going, but I really miss calli.
Yeah, apart from head prefect who identifies as a buxom, albino lass with green eyes and silver hair and pointed ears there are now no females at the site. What Happened? I’ve been busy the last week so what did I miss?
Indeed! Also Cassie of Sydney.
No, please, I tells ya – Economics 101: The impact and “incidence” of tax(es).
These are straightforward, black and white concepts, Cats.
Yet the monstrous morons lording it over us cannot comprehend basic Economics (again).
Because they are exempt from the many, many rules they impose on us.
It isn’t right, is it? 😕
No. 99%+ of boomers had nothing whatsoever to do with creating the regs , statutes and laws that you are railing on about. They were out working , saving and making sacrifices for their families- without the constant moaning and whingeing afforded by the internet to the whiney, precious generations that followed.
Speaking of sheilas on this week in culture at about the 5 minute mark there is a segment on some douche who is using crystals, AI and meditation to manifest his dream woman. The segment following is about what it is like to be a single man of 30; no way is the creature speaking a bloke. This is why the chunks are winning.
On such exposures there was an article this week which I didn’t bother to mention, about the wolves of Chernobyl.
Chernobyl Wolves Develop Cancer Resilience: Study (11 Feb)
This is completely predictable, since radiation effects empirically follow the hormesis model. The Greens agitated politically to base nuclear safety on the Linear No Threshold model, since they were anti anything nuclear. And so it’s been ever since, which is one reason why nuke plants are expensive to build in the West. But the actual data indicates that low exposure tends to cause development of immunity, because it stimulates the immune system against challenges – which might be cancer, radiation damage or other harmful things. I know that it works for arsenic exposure for example.
So it would be easy to expect that people in professions like painting would build up a tolerance, as their immune systems developed a response to any damage. And of course the same for nuclear workers, pilots and radiographers. And wolves in Chernobyl, at least the ones not being shot at by soldiers in the woods.
D’Ambrosio’s
Listened to this bint after the power fiasco here. Is she a full quid? Really?
Pauline Hanson still cops stick about her earlier unpolished elocution, this chick is on the next level.